The Family of Man

Stephen Adly Guirgis on fathering the fatherless.

Stephen McKinley Henderson as Pops, an ex-cop, in “Between Riverside and Crazy.”Credit Photograph by Ryan Pfluger.

It wasn’t until I’d read and reread, recently, a number of Stephen Adly Guirgis’s plays that I began to think seriously about the influence standup has had on contemporary American theatre. Like several other mid-career playwrights of distinction (Suzan-Lori Parks and Robert O’Hara come to mind), the forty-nine-year-old Guirgis, who has been a member of the LAByrinth Theatre Company since 1994, writes scripts that are, first and foremost, about the author’s voice: fractious, verbally packed, hard, and true. Take away Guirgis’s instinctive sense of how a play is shaped—most of his pieces have dramaturgically sturdy conclusions, especially if the preceding action has been frenetic and hard on his characters’ souls, as it almost always is—and what you have left is a series of monologues that would rival any performance by Lord Buckley, Lenny Bruce, or Dick Gregory, masters of cranked-up, broken-down hip. In “The Little Flower of East Orange,” Guirgis’s heartbreaking 2008 comedic drama about redemption scooped out of the gutter of addiction and self-pity, the hero, an on-again, off-again junkie named Danny, gets an upsetting phone call from his sister, Justina, about their mother, who has disappeared. Justina’s hysteria is a family trait:

Guirgis’s monologues are reminiscent, in their energy and sheer playfulness, of Lord Buckley’s classic routine “Subconscious Mind” (“Have you ever swung along a beautiful country road . . . Suddenly you start thinking about a beautiful girl . . . Phew! . . . And it’s like uh uh uh take me now!”). “The Little Flower of East Orange,” Guirgis’s fifth full-length play, contains another hallmark of his work: thinking female characters, whose intellect is sometimes at odds with their intuition. It’s a sad fact that many male American playwrights, both gay and straight, write female characters who seem to be born out of some peevish memory—what Mom did to me in the cradle, that sort of thing. Guirgis’s perspective may not always be entirely grownup, either—no real artist ever feels complete—but at least his women characters struggle toward the same kind of grace, armed with the same kind of hope, as his men. Veronica, the female protagonist in his first Broadway show, the exciting and enjoyable “The Motherfucker with the Hat” (2011), has a coke problem, but that nasty drug doesn’t so much get her high as help her manage her extravagant and disappointed ambitions. Guirgis is an equal-opportunity dreamer.

Oswaldo (the sexy and genuine Victor Almanzar), one of the male protagonists in Guirgis’s new play, “Between Riverside and Crazy” (an Atlantic Theatre Company production, at the Linda Gross), doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he does have language. He’s so full of it, in fact, that he’s like a comedian—he’s always angling for the spotlight. Fragile and volatile, Oswaldo is a thirtyish unemployed Nuyorican with tats and black hair in a Caesar cut. He may remind you of another of Guirgis’s characters, the convicted felon Angel Cruz, who argues about religion, being, and nothingness with a fellow-inmate in the stellar 2000 play “Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train.” Like Angel, Oswaldo is keyed up, lonely, and bewildered, it seems, by all that has gone wrong, not only in his world but in the world at large. Why is the cosmos filled with so much loneliness—and loveliness that’s perpetually out of reach? For a time, Oswaldo tried to fill his emptiness with everything bad. Now he has a caseworker at a facility he calls “the place,” who is helping him stay sober and learn something about himself, but he still doesn’t know how to be a better man, not exactly. Which is one reason that he looks to Walter (Pops) Washington (the indelible character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson), a big, rust-colored ex-cop with a voice that sounds alternately gravelly and slightly strangled. Oswaldo reveres the older man for his authority, which includes his real estate: Pops holds the lease on a large, rambling rent-controlled apartment on Riverside Drive, where he puts up Oswaldo, along with his son, Junior (Ray Anthony Thomas), and Junior’s girlfriend, Lulu (Rosal Colón).

Pops, who sits across from Oswaldo in his late wife’s wheelchair—she died around Christmas; it’s summer now—eating pie and drinking whiskey and tea, looks like a spoiled baby in a pram. Watching him, Oswaldo delivers a diatribe on his own former self-destructive habits:

See: the Ring Dings and baloney and Fanta Grape, it turns out, that’s what doctors and People magazine call “Emotional Eating” on my part—on account of I only ate that shit because those foods made me feel “safe and taken care of” back when I was a kid who was never “safe or taken care of.” But now, I’m a adult, right? So I don’t gotta eat like that no more, and I can take care of myself by getting all fit and diesel, like how I’m doing from eating these almonds and making other healthful choices like I been making. And so, I’m not trying to get all up in your business, but maybe that’s also the reason you always be eating pie—because of, like, you got Emotionalisms—ya know?

But Pops is only marginally interested in Oswaldo’s garbled homilies. How much does anyone really change? Lulu walks around the house half dressed, sometimes rubbing up against Pops; she’s a baby in need, too, but a fleshy, sexy one—the only woman in a house filled with men and the dusty fixtures of Pops’s past, including a bent Christmas tree that he can’t seem to throw out, just as he can’t throw out the bent lives that surround him.

In a revolving set created by the great Walt Spangler (this was the first time I’d seen a play at the Linda Gross and not felt that the actors and the sets were limited by the narrowness of the stage), the winds of change blow into Pops’s existence, making way for the new—and the newly corrupt. Pops’s landlord is going to court to raise the rent, and his former partner on the squad, Detective O’Connor, and her fiancé, Lieutenant Caro (Elizabeth Canavan and Michael Rispoli, both anxious, loud, and terrific), try to persuade him to accept a settlement in a lawsuit he has brought against the city. (He was accidentally shot by another police officer.) In a way, Pops is as lonely as Oswaldo. He’s a man of color who lives in chaos, and who is trying to make a kind of family order out of the disparate emotional pieces. I think that that’s Guirgis’s goal, too: to paint a credible portrait of a black father in a world where fathers are mostly absent. Certainly Oswaldo’s father is missing in action; when Oswaldo returns home at the end of Act I, drunk and violent, all he can see is that absence, which no amount of pleading or healthy eating can fill.

In Guirgis’s previous plays, the male point of view was always balanced by the tenacious earthiness of the female characters. And in the ultimately muddled and perfunctory second act of “Between Riverside and Crazy” Pops takes up with a beautiful Santeria practitioner named Church Lady (brilliantly and freely played by Liza Colón-Zayas), but the play is really centered on the idea of patriarchy: How do we father the fatherless? It’s a rich subject—this is Guirgis’s most intellectually advanced play—but you can’t analyze what you understand only intuitively. Although the director, Austin Pendleton, transports us into the characters’ inner lives with real belief and clear stage management, he can’t push what isn’t on the page, and the play, especially during the second act, becomes little more than a series of character studies. Everyone in Pops’s improvised family is left to come up with his or her own idea of what makes a father—or a man. Is it a role? A convention? A calling? Can becoming a father make a man see life anew? Guirgis, like other storytellers who explore the sacred and the profane, is most interested in how grace transforms us. His empathetic, poetic tales of ex-cons, addicts, and other men whom society would label losers return us, again and again, to a world that Guirgis, by virtue of his particular religion—the church of the streets—illuminates with the bright and crooked light of his faith. ♦

Hilton Als, The New Yorker’s theatre critic, has been a staff writer since 1994.